Sugar Rush

Friday, 1 February 2019

On June 24-25 this year, the sixth BSA Food Study Group conference, "Re-imagining food systems, sustainability, futures and the everyday", will be held at Monash University, Prato, Italy. I'm organising a panel on the theme of "Rethinking sugar" and am looking for exciting abstracts. The call for papers is below. If you would like to be involved, please send a proposed paper title and 200 word abstract to me at k.throsby@leeds.ac.uk by Friday 15th February. The final papers for the panel will be decided by the end of February, with all those who submitted proposals notified of the outcome by this date.

If there is sufficient interest, there is also the possibility of a special issue / edited collection coming out of this event.

So if you fancy joining me in Prato to talk about all things sugar, get in touch. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Call for Papers: ‘Rethinking Sugar’ Panel

Sugar consumption is increasingly supplanting dietary fat as the primary culprit in high rates of both obesity and its associated chronic diseases, with a particular focus on type II diabetes. This rush to demonise sugar is dressed in the neoliberal rhetorics of health as good citizenship, and the ‘wrongness’ of sugar is firmly sedimented in the everyday talk and practices of food, foodwork and consumption. This panel aims to explore the social, political and historical life of sugar in this moment of declared ‘crisis’, asking what other ‘work’ the repudiation of sugar is performing, what exclusions and silences that work enacts, what new subjectivities anti-sugar campaigns bring into being and to what effects, and how we can use sugar as a lens for thinking about food and health inequalities both nationally and internationally. This panel provides an opportunity to rethink sugar beyond the dominant catastrophizing anti-obesity health narrative to explore the uneven ways in which the lived realities of sugar are embodied and negotiated.

Tuesday, 29 January 2019

January is the season for widespread dietary hectoring, coaxing and coercion, but this year, the anticipated spate of anti-sugar (and by extension, anti-obesity) promotions have taken an unpleasant turn, actively mobilising the fear of food as a strategy for controlling consumption. There are two prime campaigns for this. Firstly, at the beginning of 2019, the publicly-funded Change4Life launched an anti-sugar ad which directly invokes sugar as fearful, invading the home and threatening children.

The ad summons monstrous and angry-faced sugar cubes, bursting out of boxes of cereal and other snacks and drinks to the horror of the plasticine children. It is a profoundly gendered vision of risk management, and while the father figure bravely puts himself between his children and the rampaging cubes while swiping at them with a pan, we are reassured that "Mum's got an easy way to cut back on sugar" and restore order to chaos. We see her returning from the shops to the scene of kitchen mayhem, laden with bags full of 'smart swaps' which then enable them to drive the troublesome sugar cubes out of the kitchen. The burden of responsibility on women to manage family consumption and health is unmistakeable.

The demonic cubes are also the anti-heroes of this 'sugar swaps' ad from the same January campaign, this time transported into a (male-appearing) body made entirely of sugar cubes to illustrate threats to dental health, body size and health. In this ad, sugar literally constitutes the body, and it deploys the familiar discursive strategy of accumulation to emphasise overconsumption - an extra 8 cubes a day of dietary sugar, we are told, equates to 2800 extra cubes annually; or as the Daily Mail reported at the beginning of January, British children consume 22 stone of sugar before the age of 10 - a deliberate use of a unit typically used to measure body weight (in the UK) to reinforce presumed links between obesity and sugar, as well as offering up an anxiety-provoking vision of excess (even though the consumption over 10 years of any common food would look pretty shocking).

And then, along came Veg Power, whose stated goal is to get people, and particularly children, to eat more vegetables. Anti-sugar / anti-obesity campaigner and celebrity chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a key player in the campaign, and towards the end of January, Veg Power launched a crowd-funded ad campaign called "Eat Them to Defeat Them", including a TV ad, as well as in-supermarket materials and promotions.

No matter how many times I watch the ad, I find it bafflingly ill-conceived and frankly quite disturbing. Using familiar motifs from horror genres, we see a woman in a car, suddenly surprised by a single, anthropomorphised pea, angry and threatening, announcing its arrival with a creepy "Yoohooo!". The pea is then joined by a torrent of equally enraged companions which rain down on the car and inundate the terrified woman inside. This is followed by an apocalyptic, post-industrial scene with veg missiles raining down on terrified and injured people, while a melodramatic voiceover tells us that adults have been leading the fight to defeat veg (which are trying to take over the world), but that they can't do it alone. The scene then shifts to a series of children determinedly shouting at vegetables that they're 'going down', before biting, snapping, crunching and blending them into submission.

I can only assume that the ad is trying to move away from (historically unsuccessful) attempts to persuade children of the deliciousness / nutritiousness of vegetables as a means of getting them to increase their consumption. But what sense does it make to figure vegetables as terrifying and threatening? Is a war on food the only option left open to us? It also betrays a highly contradictory understanding of the effects of advertising. The Veg Power website declares that children are bombarded with food and drink advertising, only 1.2% of which is for vegetables. This complaint presumes that advertising food products to children is effective in straightforwardly hypodermic ways - that we see and absorb those messages directly and without mediation / critical engagement. So why, then, advertise vegetables as threatening? The arguments against the advertising of processed foods are set aside by this ad, with the recognition that pleasure and taste are central to the impactfulness of ads. To address a key obsession of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the sales success of 'checkout chocolate' is because we want to eat chocolate; advertising in isolation doesn't make us do anything. And so, a different strategy is required for what we don't so easily want. I think that the Veg Power ad recognises this, but without any revision to its foundational premise about the dangers of advertising.

There are two (related) dimensions to these ads that I think are especially worrying. Firstly, they both emphasise the need for constant vigilance - either against the insidious presence of sugar in the home, or in the need to control vegetables by continuously eating them. (And presumably this latter is ironic to some extent and is a play on other public health messages, but the demand for vigilance without reprieve remains). This figures food as a prime site of risk management and personal responsibility; there is no space here to consider here who has access to what foods, for example. This need for constant vigilance is also evident in recent reporting of plans to introduce calculations of the amount of sugar in different foods into maths and English lessons to give children the skills to monitor and control their intake more effectively. Ironically, this was a space commonly occupied by fruit (John has 3 apples...), but no opportunity can be left unexploited for anti-sugar didacticism. And following on from this, the second disturbing dimension of these ads is that food is not only a site for vigilance is also a source of active threat and danger. Food emerges not as nourishing, delicious, social and necessary, or even mundane, but rather as something to be feared.

I find it hard to see how this can be anything other than harmful to children (or adults, for that matter). Fear of food is a hallmark of eating disorders, and while I would never want to suggest a direct causative relationship between any advertising and eating disorders (as is often assumed in commentaries on images of very slim (usually) women), the active encouragement of eating disordered thinking, especially among children, is profoundly disturbing. And finally, it's important to remember that in November 2018, UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, issued an excoriating report about the impact of austerity in the UK, which has seen poverty and skyrocket. Reports about hungry school children , and the travesty of holiday hunger are now mundane news features, with an estimated 4 million people forced to use foodbanks to survive - outcomes that the report criticises as deliberate political choices.

However well-intentioned these campaigns are, teaching children to be afraid of food in a social and cultural context that refuses to feed hungry children exemplifies the heartlessness of our current government and the distractive power of the attack on sugar to avoid talking about one of the most pressing issues of our times.

Saturday, 1 December 2018

Last week, I took part in a wonderful symposium, organised by Elaine Swan (Sussex) and Maud Perrier (Bristol) on Foodworks: Gendered, Racialised and Classed Labours, and this felt like the perfect opportunity to try and work up an idea that I've been dancing around, but which I now think is going to lie at the heart of the book from the sugar project - the connection between austerity and the rush to sugar, or what I have called, the sweeting of austerity. This post gives a brief summary of the ideas I discussed in my paper, and which I hope will now provide the foundations for the book proposal that is languishing in my to-do folder...

One of the key questions I've been asking myself about the rush to sugar is 'why now?'. (There's a whole other question about 'why sugar?', which I'm also working on, but that's for another post). As this chart clearly shows, there is a clear rise in sugar reporting in the early part of the 2010's after a long period of very modest and steady reporting, and I've been struggling to explain it, beyond a rather vague allusion to the need for the 'war on obesity' to continually revive itself:

But I recently read Tracey Jensen's fabulous book on parent-blaming in the context of austerity, Parenting the Crisis, and was struck by the resonance of her analysis with the ways in which the 'problem' of sugar (and those who are deemed to over-consume it) is framed and represented. So I returned to my chart, and started to take seriously the timing of the rise of sugar in the news, and in particular, its coincidence with start of the 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government and their subsequent enactment of aggressive austerity measures, including the 2012 Welfare Reform Act. These measures shrunk the welfare state, enacted punitive sanctions against those unable to conform to the proliferating conditionality's of the benefits system and created conditions of profound precarity and poverty in some of the most disadvantaged sections of society. this occurred alongside, and was facilitated by, a hardening of attitudes towards those dependent on the welfare system, including health care, sedimenting a binary between the feckless 'scroungers' who are seen as irresponsibly over-consuming public resources and the deserving 'strivers' who work hard and take responsibility for themselves and dependent others, thereby limiting their claims on public services. From this starting point, I want to make the case that austerity provides the context through which the attack on sugar has gained purchase, particularly via discourses of irresponsible overconsumption (of sugar, of health services); and conversely, the attack on sugar shores of the figure of the abject other whose presumed fecklessness is central to securing public consent for the unequal cruelties of austerity (as Imogen Tyler explains much more eloquently in her book Revolting Subjects). As such, I'm not suggesting that austerity caused the attack on sugar, but rather, that it made it possible.

In my symposium paper, I focused on two aspects of these synergies between austerity and sugar. Firstly, I looked at the way that 'the poor' are repeatedly described as much more likely to consume higher levels of sugar, to be fat and to experience chronic (and expensive) health problems, and therefore, that they should be the prime targets for anti-sugar interventions which are presumed to provide greater health gains (and financial savings) among those communities. This targeting of the poor as simultaneously the problem and the solution (as with all austerity measures) dislocates those disadvantaged individuals, households and communities from the wider social context in which their poverty is realised and sustained. In this way, it is possible for Boris Johnson in 2015, while still mayor of London, to describe a sugar tax as "a matter of social justice" since "overwhelmingly the people who will be most affected by an obesity problem will be those on the lowest incomes?" - a claim which blatantly obscures the austerity measures in which Johnson himself is heavily complicit. In these claims to social justice, the poor are held accountable for their own ill health and suffering, both in terms of their presumed imperviousness to dietary and health advice (thereby placing them in the frame for the erosion of the NHS), and in their presumed dietary incontinence. As discussed in a previous post about freakshakes, the working classes cannot be trusted with treats and don't know when to stop. These discourses and practices of objectification and blame lie at the heart of the austerity project and lend themselves seamlessly to the attack on sugar.

The second aspect I addressed in my paper was the work that the attack on sugar generates, particularly for women, who, as the primary providers of reproductive and domestic labour, are held responsible for securing a 'healthy' diet for those in their care, including male partners. The newspaper are full of what I have called 'mortified mother' stories, which borrow the make-over format beloved of reality TV to expose a family's 'real' sugar consumption through expert evaluation, and then re-educate and reform the shame-filled mother. She learns to read labels to avoid 'hidden' sugars, calculate grams of sugar, make pasta sauces from scratch, cook porridge for breakfast rather than handing out cereal bars and generally lower her family's sugar consumption without inconveniencing them. The division of labour in the household is never addressed, and the gendered work of being what Change4Life call "sugar smart", like the gendered impacts of austerity more generally, are rendered invisible.

These economies rely on an endless series of micro reduction in sugar that are parsed by the teaspoon, as illustrated by these suggestions from Action on Sugar during Sugar Awareness Week:

These normative sugar economies and their invisible footwork align comfortably with the romance of austerity, where thrift is celebrated in joyful contrast to the irresponsible over-consumption of socially abjected individuals (Tracey Jensen is eloquent on this romancing of austerity in her book). And just as the bedroom tax or a focus on benefit fraud make very minor contributions to the overall benefits bill but are symbolically laden and discursively potent interventions for sustaining and justifying health and social inequalities, so is the demand to save a teaspoon here and a teaspoon there. In this way, we need to understand the attack on sugar as never simply about an objectively knowable threat to health, but also a vector for social anxieties around deserving and undeserving citizenship, and warranted and unwarranted consumption (of food, of public resources).

This is what I mean by the sweetening of austerity, and hopefully, this will be the core of a book which is not going to happen quickly, but is one step closer to being realised.

Thursday, 15 November 2018

Our friends at Action on Sugar are at it again, this time for Sugar Awareness Week, which is taking dining out as its theme / target for this year. They have returned to their time-honoured formula of reading nutritional labels in order to uncover 'shocking' amounts of sugar in sugary foods in order to bolster a demand for nutritional labelling. This week, they have turned their attention to the 'freakshake' -a combination of milkshakes, desserts, sweets and cakes, brought together to form an overflowing, heaped confection that is purposefully and unavoidably excessive.

The freakshake was an innovation of the Pattisev Civic Cafe in Canberra in 2015, triggering a trend that blossomed and quickly ran out of steam, but which then travelled internationally. They are designed to be excessive, incorporating nutella, sweet sauces, cream, cookies, candy and cakes in a way designed to shock and delight. In the UK, freakshakes can be purchased at outlets like the Toby Carvery and Harvester.

In breathess horror, the Action on Sugar press release tells us that the Toby Carvery Unicorn Freakshake contains 1280 calories and that some shakes deliver up to 39 teaspoons of sugar; they called for a ban on similar products over 300 calories, and argued on Twitter that when consumed on a daily basis, they were the cause of obesity and tooth decay in children:

The focus on tooth decay is a relatively new departure for the organisation, whose primary focus has always been obesity. Concerns about tooth decay serve as a useful distraction here from the fat-hatred that underpins much of their public-facing material, and in practice serves as code for contempt for the fat body and its presumed (over-)consumption, as in their dental-themed poster:

The media ate the story up, revelling in the obvious excess of the shakes and milking the controversial proposal to ban them for all it was worth.

But we should pause for thought. Firstly, the idea that these are being consumed by children, or anyone, on a daily basis is fanciful. At over £5 per shake, it is ludicrous to suggest that these are part of people's everyday diets. Instead, it is far more likely that they are an occasional treat, as well as a social event - a dessert to share and a piece of excess to photograph, enjoy and bond over. Secondly, the 'shock' expressed by Action on Sugar at the sugar content of these shakes is at best naive, and at worst, disingenuous. Of course they have a lot of sugar in them (and much else besides) - the name 'freakshakes' is the giveaway here. Thirdly, they have fallen into the familiar trap of focusing on nutritional content to the exclusion of context. The survey tells us nothing about how these shakes are consumed, and by whom, in what quantities and at what frequency. And this points to the fourth, and most damning, problem with Action on Sugar's latest 'hidden sugar shock' campaign - it's profoundly classed nature. By focusing on outlets like Toby Carvery and Harvester, they are signalling classed forms of consumption that suggest that only some can be trusted to consume treats moderately. No-one is calling on Jamie Oliver to ban his 600+ calorie dessert, The Ambassador (49g / 12 teaspoons of sugar), but 'highstreet' outlets - which is increasingly code for 'working class' - are directly in the firing line, presumably because their customers are not to be trusted in the face of the 'freakshake', which they are assumed to consume repeatedly and in ignorance. And this leads to the fifth problem - the assumption that the answer to the 'problem' of the freakshake, as with all processed foods, is clear labelling. The call for nutritional labelling is premised on the conviction that if only people knew what was in their food they would make better choices, but do Action on Sugar really believe that those purchasing a 'freakshake' are unaware that it has a high sugar / fat content? Are they not aware that the shared pleasures of excess are probably the precise point of purchasing it in the first place?

Sugar Awareness Week is a combination of shock tactics, calls for labelling that assume consumer ignorance, the dislocation food from the context of consumption, and miserly calls for small sugar economies:

These are a disturbing echo of the demands that those living on ever-diminishing benefits should / could survive cheaply on less, effectively blaming them for their own hunger and malnourishment. The hand-wringing focus on the purposeful and celebratory excess of the freakshake obscures classist assumptions about the chaotic consumption and nutritional ignorance of the poor (and sick) and, once again, fails to engage with the social life of food and foodwork in the interests of political expediency and an easily packaged, attention-grabbing message.

I do not believe that Action on Sugar are actually shocked by the amount of sugar in a freakshake (and if they are, then they immediately relinquish the right to comment on nutrition), but I do believe that they are actively and cynically mobilising the rhetorics of 'shock' in order to communicate a message dangerously dislocated from the social world in which food - including freakshakes - is consumed and made meaningful. And for this reason, we should be very sceptical.

Monday, 10 September 2018

There's been a recent proliferation of what I am calling "deliverable nutrition" - that is, products that offer meals actively coded as nutritious, but which are quick and convenient to prepare. It's a direct response to concerns about the heavily processed foods in which sugar is commonly implicated, and which are widely understood as nutritionally poor and health damaging. I'm including products such as meal kits (e.g. Gousto, HelloFresh), chilled, freezable, freshly made 'ready meals' (e.g. Allplants) and meal replacement shakes (e.g. Huel). These products and services are characterised not only by claims to being nutritionally positive, but also convenient, environmentally responsible, low-waste and economical, while providing 'real food', which is 'fast' but not 'junk'. They differ in cost, the preparatory work demanded of the consumer and in what constitutes a 'meal', both materially and as an event. Products are increasingly being tailored to specific dietary preferences, such as gluten free, vegan and low carb, and customers are invited to subscribe in order to minimise costs and to secure brand loyalty. They are not marketed directly as weight loss products, although the shadow of obesity is ever present.

As I start to think about these, I decided that I should try some of them out before working on them further. I'm slightly limited by the fact that I am a vegan, which not all services cater to comprehensively, but I decided to start out with the one that I was most sceptical about, since it is the one most obviously distanced from recognisable food: Huel. According to the website, Huel (a contraction of Human Fuel) is "a nutritionally complete powdered food that contains all the proteins, carbs and fats you need, plus at least 100% of the European Union's 'Daily Recommended Amounts' of all 26 essential vitamins and minerals". It is, according to the website, "the future of food" - an answer to the problems of poor nutrition, food waste and obesity that are seen as characterising contemporary society. The blurb on the website looks back nostalgically to a pre-agricultural revolution past where hunter-gatherers ate from nutritional necessity and were in constant motion - a life that eventually gave way to the constant availability of processed foods and inactivity. In line with every food revolution / anti-obesity intervention, they demand that "Something must be done" about the current parlous state of population health and (over-)consumption, and Huel presents itself as one answer. It is entirely vegan, and is made from a blend of oats, pea protein, flaxseed, brown rice protein, medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) from coconut and sunflower oil, a bespoke vitamin and mineral blend and a sweetener. It comes in five flavours (vanilla, berry, original, coffee and unflavoured / unsweetened), plus there is a range of powdered 'flavour boosts' including mint chocolate, banana, pineapple and coconut, chocolate and more. At its most economical (by buying on subscription in bulk), it comes in at £1.33 per meal; the starter pack of two bags of Huel powder plus a branded T-shirt, shaker and plastic scoops works out at £1.45 per meal (@28 meals for the two bags).

Huel was an obvious choice for me because it is vegan, and I ordered a starter pack, selecting one original (vanilla) flavoured bag and, knowing that I'm not keen on heavily sweetened shakes, one unsweetened / unflavoured.

The design is minimalist, in line with its mission to simplify good nutrition, and the product has a shelf life of a year in its easily resealable bags. The website recommends consuming 2 Huel meals a day, focusing on breakfast and lunch, given that these are the meals most people will be more likely to eat on the go, followed by a balanced third meal. But they emphasise flexibility here - that some will just want one Huel meal a day; that others will need more than three meals (e.g. people who are physically active or trying to bulk up); or that some will want to have an additional small snack meal (one scoop, rather than the prescribed three for a full meal), which we are told equates calorifically to a bag of crisps. The basic method of preparation is three scoops of Huel mixed with water and then shaken vigorously to blend. You can add in flavour boosters, and they also suggest adding some ice-cubes. Additionally, they suggest that the powder can be used like flour for baking, and there is also a range of branded bars and granola, which I didn't try.

For my first Huel meal, I tried 3 scoops of original vanilla with water and shook it up in the branded shaker, but this was not a success for me - it was too grainy, and the oaty taste was unpalatable. I went back to the website and social media pages and found lots of suggestions from fellow "Huelers" about how to customise the product to taste, so I tried again. This time, I added in a frozen banana, some frozen berries and almond milk instead of water, and whizzed it up in a high speed blender. Much better. This was much creamier with a livelier taste, although the additions would add to the calorie counts (if you care about such things), and to the cost per meal. (I was frustrated at first that they don't do taster packs and make you buy two whole bags from the get go, but I started to see why - you have to experiment to find what works. Otherwise, I would definitely have stopped after that first try). I decided to go with the recommended plan of 2 Huel meals a day for my trial week, and began to experiment with the taster box of flavour boosters that I had also purchased with my starter pack, always blended with a frozen banana and almond milk as a base, and depending on the flavour, sometimes other frozen fruits. My favourite by far was the mint chocolate, which is delicious; this was always my favourite ice-cream flavour and one of my biggest losses since becoming vegan, so this was a lovely surprise. I had an unfortunate encounter with the mocha flavour, which is very tasty, but contains caffeine. If I'd thought about it, I should have known, but since the package only referred to 'flavourings', I casually assumed that it was caffeine free; I don't consume any caffeine normally, so was treated to an afternoon of a racing heart and headaches. My mistake, although it could probably do with being stated directly on the package.

I never managed to get on with it just shaken up with water or almond milk, which limits its portability and convenience and requires some planning ahead for consuming out and about, but with a frozen banana, some flavouring and a blender, I found it easy and palatable. And it is surprisingly filling, keeping blood sugar levels very stable and eliminating the between-meal munchies. However, because of injury, beyond a bit of running and Pilates, I'm not doing anything like my usual training and my appetite is pretty low, so I would probably have needed more Huel meals, or regular food, otherwise. There are lots of warnings online about potential digestive disruptions after switching to Huel - depending on how high in fibre your previous diet was, its high fibre content can be a bit of a shock to the system - but as someone who eats a primarily whole foods, plant-based diet, this wasn't an issue for me. I felt well nourished and energised, and while I am slightly sceptical about claims to 'complete nutrition' that can't really take into account individual needs and which presume a certainty of nutritional knowledge that isn't really supported by the history and present of nutritional science, I really felt like I was 'eating' well and getting what I needed to go about my daily business. Nutritionally speaking, I'd feel fairly confident about consuming this on a longer term basis. The website states very clearly that this is not a weight loss product, but many "Huelers" are clearly using it as such, and the forums and social media are full of triumphant reports of pounds lost (with the occasional person using it to bulk up). As a point of principle, I do not weigh myself and so don't have any idea whether it affected my weight, and a single week wouldn't tell us anything useful on that front anyway.

So what is my verdict? It is highly palatable (in my case, when blended with frozen fruit and flavour boosters), nutritionally effective and very time-efficient. It is very effective in producing satiety, and if you're in a rush, it's a much better solution than scouring the sandwich section of the supermarket for something vegan that will probably only fill you up for a couple of hours. It would also be a good back-up for long train and car journeys, when it can be difficult to find any decent vegan food on the go. It's reasonably economical, although these things are all relative, and it would still be well out of reach for the many people currently living on devastatingly curtailed benefits and low wages in this country. And it has the benefits of considerable adaptability of taste and texture, which fends off the boredom (to some extent) that accompanies many meal replacement products. So in many ways, it gets a thumbs up from me.

But...and it's a big but... while I think it's a good product, I just couldn't get fully on board with the concept and I really started to miss actual food that you have to chew. There's something quite infantile about consuming shakes, especially given that they're mostly some version of sweet. I found the shaker too alienating and had each meal out of a glass instead, which helped; I even tried making it up very thick so that I had to eat it with a spoon like melting ice-cream (a mint chocolate winner). But while it meets nutritional needs, it strips away all the other meanings and functions of food, and the decisions that come with it. Of course, this is exactly the appeal of meal replacement shakes for many, and especially those for whom the management of food is an exhausting emotional and / or practical struggle - it takes food and food decisions off the table. But I want my meals to be more than fuel, and I missed the 'foodness' of food too much for it to be a workable long-term solution for me. I did my trial while my partner was away for the week, but I couldn't imagine us sitting down to a couple of glasses of Huel together, and I found my half-empty fridge depressing; I missed the process of rummaging around and pulling out ingredients to prepare my meals (although I accept that this too is a privilege of time and resources), or opening up my lunchbox at work to a heap of delicious leftovers from the previous night's dinner. And I really missed savoury food; by the time I got to my evening meal, I was desperate for foods of different textures and tastes. If powdered nutrition really is the future of food, I worry about the direction we're heading; perhaps instead we should be talking about the financial and time pressures of everyday life and work that make sitting down to a freshly prepared meal impossible and that make shaking up a liquid lunch a plausible long-term solution.

Having said that, I will be keeping Huel at the ready in my cupboard, especially for office days, when I often have to leave the house too early to be able to stomach breakfast and end up eating toast at the office, which leaves me peckish again by 10.30. I love that it's vegan, and think that a lot of time and energy has gone into making an adaptable, tasty product; they also have excellent customer service and easy and prompt delivery. It was a fun experiment, but I have to say that I'm glad it's over; it turns out that I just like food too much to be a dedicated "Hueler".

Saturday, 11 August 2018

Hot on the heels of their blueberry muffin hidden sugar shock survey back in March of this year, Action on Sugar are back with a new survey, this time with the added gloss of scientific authority through publication in the open access journal, BMJ Open. The study is a survey conducted in 2016 of the sugar content of 381 cakes and 481 biscuits available in 9 main UK supermarkets, and gathered the sugar and energy content from packaging and labelling with the aim of exploring variations across products. The findings, perhaps not surprisingly, were that cakes and biscuits contain quite a lot of sugar, with 97% of cakes and 74% warranting a 'red' traffic light label for sugar content. But as with the blueberry muffin story, the aim is not really to show that cakes and biscuits are sugary, but to highlight the variation in sugar content between products - a finding which is taken as illustrating that reductions in sugar and energy content are possible but that manufacturers are dragging their feet in doing this.

And because every food story needs an enemy, the paper holds up Battenberg cake as containing the highest average amounts of sugar, while the blueberry muffin is somewhat redeemed from its previous shaming by having the lowest average sugar content among the cakes. The media jumped on the Battenberg story, and the Sunday Times published this graphic (credited to Queen Mary University, which is the institutional home of the four authors):

The graphic uses the familiar measure of the teaspoon to quantify the sugar, but uses 100g portions, even though serving data is also included in the study. In the case of the Battenberg for example, a 50g serving would be up to 7.5 teaspoons, which still equates to a full adult allowance, but is much less headline-grabbing than 15 teaspoons. While the Sunday Times was busy throwing up its hands up in horror at the public health threat posed by Battenberg cake, the Guardian stepped in to protect readers from the "dangerously sugary" real thing with a low sugar alternative that could be made at home. This included making low sugar marzipan using medjool dates and strawberry coulis rather than using jam. While there is certainly much fun to be had in home-baking, it seemed like an awful lot of soulless trouble to go to to shave off a teaspoon or two of sugar from something that's meant to be, well....sugary.

The BMJ Open study describes its key limitation as having to rely on nutritional information provided by manufacturers. This is not only a not-so-subtle suggestion that manufacturers can't be trusted, but also, it completely overlooks the real problems with this study, which lie in its inability to see cake (and biscuits) as anything other than a collection of nutrients. Within this nutritionist frame, all cakes are the same, or at least, all Battenbergs or all brownies are the same. Indeed, the conclusion that reformulation is possible is founded on the conviction that different brands of the same type of cake are fundamentally the same thing, with some just more responsibly formulated than others. But we all know that this isn't the case - not all chocolate cakes, or all Battenberg cakes, are the same, with taste and texture depending on how it is constituted and manufactured; and purchasing is governed by cost, but also by preference or occasion - someone might buy a rich, expensive cake for a special occasion, but something less expensive as a more mundane treat. When we do this, we know that those two products are not the same and balance the different factors accordingly; the failure of the authors to see this shows a spectacular dislocation from the lived experience of food.

And following on from this, the study completely overlooks the affective dimensions of cake. When I saw the Battenberg story, and all of the media images of this yellow and pink confection, I flashed immediately back to my Nana's dining room table at tea time in the 1970's. Cake has meanings far beyond its specific nutrients; in this case, it was a dramatic taste-memory full of grandparental love, delicious treats and happy days. I know that this attaching of emotions to sugary foods is exactly the kind of thing that anti-sugar campaigns object to, and we are constantly being urged to find new ways to share birthdays, celebrate successes or find consolation, but the reduction of food to an assemblage of nutrients is to completely ignore the fact that (all) food is irretrievably social and the meanings it bears can never be contained in the 'nutritional information' label. I find it hard to take dietary advice seriously when it comes from a position of such utter dislocation from food and eating.

I don't eat shop-bought cakes, not because I'm horrified by their sugar content, but because I'm a vegan, which excludes pretty much all supermarket cakes and biscuits; ultimately, I think that the killing and exploitation of animals to make those products is far more disturbing than their sugar content. (This is a blog for another day, since the derogation of veganism is a staple of the low-carb, high-fat diets in which many prominent anti-sugar activists are heavily invested). But regardless of whether I eat those products or not, I am convinced that it is necessary to push back against this kind of reductive categorisation of (particular) foods and ingredients as a threat to health. If the authors of the report are right, and those particular products are to blame for both obesity and the health problems commonly associated with it in ways that constitute an urgent public health crisis, then it is hard to see how determinedly reading the labels of over 800 products that people already know to be sugary can intervene meaningfully in that. If they're wrong, then the splashing of 'hidden sugar shock' stories like this across the media constitutes a troubling distraction from broader questions about food quality, accessibility and affordability in contemporary society, and disregards the profound social significance of food, including cakes and biscuits, and the ways in which it becomes meaningful to people in complex and unpredictable ways.

Tuesday, 5 June 2018

On April 6thof this year, the Soft Drinks Industry Levy – more colloquially known as the ‘sugar tax’ – came into effect. Framed as part of attempts to tackle child obesity, the levy added 18p per litre for drinks containing 5-8g of sugar per 100ml, and 24p per litre for drinks containing more than 8g of sugar per 100ml. The levy was declared a success even at its outset, with a Treasury press release noting that since the announcement of the tax in the March 2016 budget, over 50% of manufacturers had already reduced the sugar content of their drinks in order to pre-empt the levy. The press release promised that the £240 million expected to be raised from the levy would be used to fund school sports programmes and breakfast clubs. As it came into effect, celebrity chef and anti-sugar activist, Jamie Oliver, tweeted an image of sugar cubes arrayed in front of bottles of soft drinks to show their added sugar content, along with the link to his website, where he applauded the move, describing sugary drinks as “the single largest source of sugar and empty calories in our children’s diets – action is essential”.

But amidst the self-congratulatory praise for the sugar tax from its advocates as striking a brave blow for child health in the face of industry opposition, the foundational assumptions upon which the sugar tax is built remain highly problematic, particularly in its loose relation to evidence and the dislocation of the desire for ‘action’ from the social and material inequalities which frame the consumption of sugar. In this blog post, I explore some of the debates and assumptions around the sugar tax and how these frame the ‘problem’ of sugar.

Responses to the sugar tax ranged from cries of ‘nanny state’ interference to celebratory demands to extend the tax beyond sugary drinks to include all high sugar snack foods. But they find common ground in the construction of obesity as a problem, with the fat body figuring variously as a disease, as the cause of other diseases, as the visible proxy for (preventable) ill-health, and most importantly, as a problem about which, in Oliver’s terms, ‘action is essential’ – a compulsion to act which loosens the reliance on evidence in favour of immediate action. For example, the case of Mexico is commonly cited as evidence of the effectiveness of taxation. Following the introduction of a tax on sugary drinks in 2014, sales fell by approximately 12% by the end of 2014 (and up to 17% among the poorest communities), fuelling demands for similar measures elsewhere. However, the health effects of this reduction in sales remain entirely theoretical, and there is currently no evidence of the desired health benefits for which falling drinks sales are mobilised as a proxy. Closer to home, Jamie Oliver’s 2015 decision to add a 10p levy to the added-sugar drinks in his “Italian” chain of restaurants, resulting in a 9.3% decrease in sales over 6 months, was hailed as auguring well for the sugar tax, with reduced consumption functioning as a proxy for health biomarkers and as predictive of the effects of a tax at the national level. However, this fails to take into account the class profile of his customers, who will already have been strongly attuned to the moral hazards of sugary drink consumption and Oliver’s vocal role as an anti-sugar advocate. Furthermore, it is disingenuous to align the decision to drink, or not drink, Oliver’s ‘fairtrade and organic’ Karma Cola (£3.00) on a restaurant night out with the real targets of the sugar tax – those of lower socio-economic status whose consumption is prefigured as excessive, ill-informed and most in need of intervention.

The construction of sugar as a ‘problem’ that affects us all, and of interventions aimed at middle class restaurant patrons as offering meaningful lessons across populations, entrenches and obscures social inequalities in ways that mitigate directly against structural change in favour of the coercive ‘nudging’ of food individualised food choices. For example, the channelling of the revenue from the tax into school sports smoothes quietly over the devastation of (state) school sports facilities by consecutive governments, while simultaneously shoring up the normative link between sport and the ‘war on obesity’. This forces those children already targeted because of their size to endure the shame of participating in a class whose specific goal is to eliminate bodies like theirs.

Plans to use revenue to provide food for hungry children also conceal disturbing truths about life in contemporary Britain through their normalisation of poverty and deprivation. For example, in January this year, a group of Conservative MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nicky Morgan and Nicholas Soames teamed up with ex-Labour front-bencher, Frank Field to call for revenue from the sugar tax to be used to address ‘holiday hunger’ among children with no access to free school meals during school holidays. It’s hard to object to hungry children being fed, but this philanthropic largesse leaves unaddressed the reasons why such a thing as ‘holiday hunger’ even exists in the UK today. Furthermore, it obscures the many other forms of suffering and hardship that a family experiencing profound food poverty must be negotiating, as well as the role of austerity measures such as benefit cuts and sanctions in creating and exacerbating those hardships – government policies supported by these same Conservative politicians (see for example, Rees-Mogg’s voting record).

Time will tell what effects – both desired and collateral – the sugar tax will have, but the aggressive pursuit of a single-nutrient solution to complex health and social problems should give us all pause for thought – not only in terms of who will bear the financial burdens of those interventions, but also what assumptions about individual responsibility, bodies and health underpin them. Just as Jamie Oliver’s campaign about sugary drinks isn’t really aimed at the consumers of his Karma Cola (or indeed his Epic Tiramisu dessert (£6.50, 40g of sugar)), the sugar tax targets the bodies and consumption habits of derogated Others, locking them into a narrative of exercise and education deficit to the exclusion of the broader social inequalities which they themselves might choose to prioritise as central to their own wellbeing.